AppleWatchTumbleUnless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Apple is holding a press event today in San Francisco. The company has invited selected members of the press to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater for a “Spring Forward” event that will feature a presentation by executives about forthcoming products.

While the exact agenda isn’t known, Apple’s event is expected to revolve around the Apple Watch, the company’s smartwatch that was announced in September. The Watch is supposed to be on sale by next month, and this event will almost certainly provide people with final details about its functionality, pricing and availability.

For those who can’t be there in person, Apple is hosting a live stream of all its proceedings at Apple.com/live/ for people who have Safari on their Macs or iOS devices. The stream (along with the event) will kick off at 10 a.m. PDT.

Stay tuned to this post for more information from the event.

screenshot_15Tim Cook has taken the stage at Apple’s press event in San Francisco, and there’s one big announcement off the bat: the company is partnering with HBO on HBO Now, a new stand-alone streaming service that lets people watch shows from the premium cable channel without a cable subscription. HBO CEO Richard Plepler said that the service will launch in April exclusively on Apple devices, with a special channel on the Apple TV.

It will cost $14.99 a month, and people who sign up in April will get their first month free. It’s not yet clear how long HBO’s exclusivity agreement with Apple will last, but the service will launch in time for the premiere of Game of Thrones.

In addition to the HBO Now announcement, Cook slashed the price of the Apple TV from $99 to $69. The price shift makes Apple’s set-top box cheaper than Amazon’s top-end Fire TV, but it remains more expensive than the Chromecast and Fire TV Stick.

IMG_0010Jeff Williams, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Operations, unveiled a new system called ResearchKit designed to help medical researchers use the iPhone as a tool for collecting medical research data. Users can sign up for research through different apps focused on different diseases including Parkinson’s Disease, Diabetes and Asthma. Users can get real-time feedback about their medical data, and researchers will get access to detailed data from the phone’s sensors in addition to any they collect from the app itself.

Users will be able to control what data they share with researchers, and do so in a secure way. Even though Apple provides the development kit, the company won’t have any access to the health data that users share. ResearchKit will be open source, so that people can get access to it even outside Apple’s platforms.

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